Huge Tracking Dish to Become Available for EME Through Efforts of OMARC and InfoAge Museum

The InfoAge Science History Museum in Wall Township, New Jersey, plans to make a 60 foot tracking dish antenna available to hams for moonbounce, secondary to its function as a radiotelescope. It was on the InfoAge site, then part of Fort Monmouth, that the US Army’s “Project Diana” team in 1946 first received radio signals bounced from the moon. According to InfoAge’s Martin Flynn, W2RWJ, Daniel Marlow, K2QM, an InfoAge board member who teaches physics at Princeton, wants to use the dish, currently under rehabilitation after being dormant since the 1970s, to pursue radio astronomy for instructional purposes. Marlow’s primary goal is to restore the TLM-18 dish antenna to working order and use it to see the 21 centimeter radiation from the Milky Way. But he also wants to observe radio pulsars, and since that activity can be performed at 70 centimeters, the TLM-18 will be made available to the Amateur Radio community for EME at 432 MHz on a secondary basis. The dish, adjacent to the Ocean Monmouth Amateur Radio Club’s (OMARC) N2MO at InfoAge, offers a gain of 35 dBi at 465 MHz. Project Diana occupied the building housing N2MO, Flynn noted. The after-effects of Hurricane Sandy continue to hinder the dish rehab project; power on the InfoAge campus remains out since the storm last year, and the facility is running on generator power. “It has slowed down the efforts at putting the TLM-18 back into service but has not stopped them,” Flynn said, noting that OMARC members have been behind the project from Day One. It’s hoped the dish will be ready for service next year. — Thanks to InfoAge and Martin Flynn, W2RWJ

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Looking For Division Archives

At a recent hamfest I found a program from the 1982 Hudson Division
Convention. Over the past few years I’ve found only one or two items
of note regarding our Division and its’ history. It made me realize
that there was no central repository for items of a historical nature
that dealt specifically with the Hudson Division. There appears to be
a dearth of these materials.There have been conventions, both Division and National, in the Hudson
Division going back to the 1930s, clubs galore with their own QSL
cards, newsletters that were sent to members by Division leadership,
and so forth. So before it’s too late, and while we still have
members who have squirreled away copies of these materials in filing
cabinets or basement boxes, I am reaching out to the Division and
asking that you consider one of two things. First, please consider
parting with these materials and letting me take them. I’ll scan
them, put them up on the Division website to share with the members,
and then pass them on to succeeding Directors as the keepers of our
story.If you would prefer not to part with them, then please consider
scanning the items for placing on the website. Items would include:
Convention programs, Director newsletters (yes, they used to be printed
and mailed), Club QSL cards, QSL cards of operators of note, pins,
badges, etc., etc.Please let me know what you have